CALLAS IN DALLAS

For one transcendent evening, the Music Hall at Fair Park was the world’s most important opera house — the night Maria Callas debuted “Medea.”

In the ’50s, Lone Star oil barons pushed Big D’s transformation from a cow town to an elite metroplex. For its 1957 inaugural season, the Dallas Civic Opera had assumed a vivid presence by luring “The Diva,” who attracted audiences and critics from around the world.

Callas’ angelic voice was as famous as her volcanic temperament. The flashing-eyed prima donna was regarded as blunt and brutally honest ... but her lacerating critiques were usually spot on.

She wasn’t slumming it in North Texas.

Dallas’ emerging opera company didn’t have warehouses filled with old sets and costumes. Almost everything was built anew. In our bid for cultural supremacy, the look of Dallas operas was as important as the sound.

Texans were proud to have Callas in their boom town. Angry readers chastised The Dallas Morning News for publishing reports about her masochistic intensity and legendary hissy fits. Callas felt cheered by the protective welcome. Her adoring locals were known as “Callasites.”

For the Civic Opera’s sophomore season, she returned. The 1958 program included “Medea” — about a witch-princess who beheads her brother, stabs her children and sends her lover’s wife up in flames. In short, the role Callas was born to portray.

She arrived in Dallas amid frustrated negotiations with New York’s Metropolitan Opera. The Met’s general director Rudolph Bing wanted Callas for 26 performances in three operas. She balked at the demanding schedule.

On Nov. 6, 1958, Bing telegramed Callas to cancel her contract. Bing told the press that the Met was glad to be rid of both Callas and her histrionics.She still had to debut “Medea” that night — at a less-than-stellar venue, but it was all Dallas had.

Designed by Lang & Witchell in 1925, the Music Hall is a ponderous yellow-tan bricked barn that encompasses more than 80,000 square feet. Its architectural details are a mix of Spanish Baroque and Italian eclecticism. The hall’s six “stair towers” are capped with cast-stone domes decorated in sea shells and scroll treatments.

The hall’s acoustics were notoriously detrimental, due to the building’s leaky flaws and lightweight roof deck. Opera singers aren’t amplified: Voices have to carry over the orchestra. In the 4,100-seat Music Hall, it takes the lung power of a tornado.

Bing’s dismissal made Callas seem like she’d been exiled from all of Western civilization’s opera companies. But that night, she belonged to Dallas.

From reports of those who witnessed “Medea,” Callas surpassed all expectations by balancing rage and fierce indomitability with a breathtaking range of emotions — from mezza voce velvet turning to clarion clear drama. Beating the floor in a frenzy to summon the gods, Callas’ Medea produced the full measure of pity and terror that were the aims of Classical Greece. Insight and art could have done no more. Dallas heard and saw the ultimate.

She was magnificent. Electrifying. Callas sang for the citizens who loved her, for Bing and for all those celebrating her humiliation. That night, she received thunderous ovations.